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Every once in a while I get asked about how to set up some kind of web presence. People want to talk to friends and family. They want to throw their thoughts out into the Internet wind to see where they land. Sometimes they have visions of grandeur. Sometimes they just want to put up pictures of their kids for grandparents to access.

I used to do web hosting, on a traditional hosted server. I don’t like supporting it, and it doesn’t make any money unless you have hordes of customers, which I don’t really want because I have a perfectly good job, thanks very much. Hosting on a small scale just isn’t worth the hassle. Hosting on a large scale isn’t what I want to be doing.

So what do I tell people? I tell them to go look at WorldPress.com and other blogging hosts, for one. But even though I’ve been on the Internet since, well, a really long time, I have never had a WordPress blog. Not even an account. Just never did it.

So how can I tell people “Just go open a WordPress account” if I’ve never done it? Well, now I have done it. Now I can say “I used that WordPress thing, and boy was it cool.” Or maybe I’ll start telling people to go elsewhere. I doubt that last bit. But now I’ll find out.

I’m also trying out an account over on Blogger. So far, WordPress has a nicer interface and feature set, maybe by a good margin. But I use Google for a lot of other things. Not sure where I’ll end up. Probably back hosting my own sites. We’ll see.